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2. Use Kindle devices and Kindle applications. You can test KF8 content on a Kindle e Ink
device or a Fire tablet.
3. Use KDP. The Kindle Direct Publishing Platform accepts a variety of book formats and provides
preview capability on the website. To learn more or sign up, visit http://kdp.amazon.com .
Note: When testing Kindle Edition with Audio/Video content, the audio and video cannot be previewed.
Consider device compatibility. Keep in mind that users may wish to read your content on an extremely
wide variety of devices, with very small or large screens and low or high resolution. Try to test your
content on as diverse a selection of devices as possible, especially for complex Kindle books.
Once you can read your book, use this checklist to confirm that your Kindle book does not contain blatant
errors.
1. Open the book for the first time or go to the cover page.
o Cover: The Kindle book should have a cover.
o Single Cover: From the cover, flip to the next page. There should not be another image
of the cover page.
2. Go to the table of contents.
o In the table of contents, each item should be clickable and should link to the correct
location in the book. There should be no page numbers in the TOC.
3. Go to any location in the book (reflowable eBooks only).
o Font size: Change the font size in the Kindle menu; the book font should change
accordingly. Regular text should not be bold or italicized.
o Typeface: Change the typeface in the Kindle menu; the book font should change
accordingly. If you have designed your book to use only a specific font file, please make
sure that you have followed guidelines in section 9.3.8 Using Embedded Fonts. Not
following these guidelines could lead to the Kindle settings reverting to the customer's
preferred reading font.
4. Go back to the first page and flip through every page of the book.
o Images: Images should not be too small. Make sure that all text in images is legible.
Large pictures should be scaled to fit the page and display in their entirety on one screen.
o Tables: Tables should appear correctly. Make sure that all text in tables is legible.
o Material only included with physical book: There should not be any references to
material (such as a CD or DVD) that is only included with the physical book.
o Background settings (reflowable eBooks only): On a Kindle tablet device or
Previewer, confirm that your text is legible in all background color modes (white, black,
mint, and sepia).
o Magnification (fixed-layout only): Activate pop-ups/panel view and check that all text
content and/or panels have corresponding magnification, no content is overflowing the
edge of the screen, and magnified reading order is correct.
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Part III. Guidelines for Specific Types of
eBooks
9 Creating Text-Heavy Fiction and Non-Fiction eBooks (Reflowable)
Amazon refers to text-heavy fiction and non-fiction eBooks as "reflowable" because this type of content
reflows when an eBook's text settings are changed. In general, a book can be converted as a reflowable
eBook when the body text can be easily separated from the background images without losing any
context or important layout design.
The reflowable format supports a number of features that allow readers to interact with and customize the
way the text appears on their devices. These features include dictionary, X-Ray (when available), text-to-
speech (when available), and the ability to change text and formatting settings.
Metadata Guidelines
9.1
eBooks are reflowable by default. Reflowable eBooks do not need to specify meta name="book-type"
in the OPF file.
Layout Guidelines
9.2
Create the content using single column layout and avoid using position:absolute for alignments.
Text Guidelines
9.3
9.3.1 Body Text Must Use Defaults
The body text in a reflowable Kindle book (fiction and non-fiction) must be all defaults. Amazon
encourages content creators to use creative styles for headings, special paragraphs, footnotes, tables of
contents, etc., but not for body text. The reason for this is that any styling on body text in the HTML will
override the user’s preferred default reading settings. Users report such behavior as a poor reading
experience. Here are the most important points:
•
Body text must use the default font size (1em) and line height. Body text should not use the
<font size="…"> tag or the font-size and line-height attributes in CSS.
•
Body text should not be primarily bold or italicized. Selected parts of the text can be bold or
italicized for emphasis. This guideline only prohibits a book from being entirely bold, for example.
•
Body text should not have an imposed font color throughout the book. If you prefer to use
imposed font color in some sections of your book, please do not use too light or too dark a color.
Light colors will not display with enough contrast on devices set to white backgrounds or on e Ink
devices. Dark colors will not display well on devices set to black backgrounds. Please see the
W3C recommendation described here for maintaining a readable contrast ratio between text and
background colors. For grays, use colors within the hex value range of #666 to #999.
o To determine if a color falls within this range, convert your color to RGB values using a
tool such as http://hex-color.com/. Plug the resulting three numbers into the following
formula: Y = 0.2126*R + 0.7152*G + 0.0722*B. If the value of Y falls within a range of
102 and 153, this color will create a good customer experience across Kindle devices
and applications.
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In a book with Enhanced Typesetting enabled, Kindle readers can be sure that any text of any
color that appears above any background color will be legible. Font colors will adapt automatically
to provide sufficient contrast with either the device color theme chosen by the reader or to the
background color of any element. In the below example, the same colors (“yellow”, “black”, and
“orange”) were applied to both the font and their background container; notice how the font color
changes to provide readable contrast with the background. To learn more about Enhanced
Typesetting, see section 15.
•
Body text must not have a black or white background color. Customers report this as a bad user
experience because it can create an awkward, boxy reading experience when the device
background is set to a different color and because the text can become invisible when a user
changes the background color setting on their device and the font color automatically inverts.
•
Body text should not have a forced font face. Make sure that you have followed guidelines in
section 9.3.8 Using Embedded Fonts. Not following these guidelines could lead to customers not
having the ability to change their preferred reading font.
•
Body text must not use non-breaking spaces in place of normal spaces in between words in
paragraphs.
•
Body text must not have an imposed left/right margin or padding throughout the book. If there are
paragraphs that do require left/right margin to differentiate them visually from body text, like a
recipe list or a block quote, margins applied to these sections should be specified as percentages
rather than ems or point values.
9.3.2 Formatting Paragraphs
KindleGen automatically indents the first line of every paragraph by default. To change this behavior, use
the text-indent style on the <p> tag. For example:
•
<p style="text-indent:0"> - no indentation of the first line
•
<p style="text-indent:2em"> - positive indent, 2 ems
We recommend using no more than 4 ems of text indent for body paragraphs.
To change the space before or after each paragraph, use the margin-top or margin-bottom styles
respectively on the <p> tag. We recommend using em values for these attributes.
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Never use the height property to control the size of elements containing text or instances of overlapping
text may occur in your book. The height property should only ever be applied to images in reflowable
books.
9.3.3 Monospaced Font Is Supported
Kindle uses a default font for content if none is specified; it also supports a monospaced font.
Kindle uses the monospaced font to render content in the following tags: <pre>, <code>, <samp>,
<kbd>, <tt>, <font face="courier">, <font face="monospace">.
With the exception of <pre>, the tags listed above do not change the text alignment. If the content in
these tags should be left-aligned, wrap the tags listed above in a <div> styled with CSS using text-
align:left.
Publishers can include their own font for their content. Amazon has a quality assurance process to ensure
that these fonts display well on e Ink-based devices and do not impair the reading experience.
9.3.4 Avoid Using Fixed Values for Most Elements
Avoid using fixed values such as points and pixels for CSS properties such as font-size, width,
height, margin, padding, text-indent, and line-height. To enable rendering across various
screen sizes and resolutions, specify these values in ems or percentages.
To ensure pagination, the Kindle Reader does not honor line-height value less than 1.2 em or 120%.
9.3.5 Margin and Padding Formatting
When using left or right margin and padding CSS properties, specify the values in percentage (%)
instead of em units. This ensures that the margins do not grow too wide with large font sizes and impair
reading. Margins should be assigned values of 0 or greater to keep content from falling off the edge of the
screen or overlapping other content. Always set left and right margins to 0 for normal body text to allow
users the full range of margin selection using device defaults. Top/bottom margins should be specified in
ems so that spacing between paragraphs is easily distinguishable at any font or device size.
9.3.6 Drop Caps
Elements such as drop caps should be specified using percentages or relative units (positive or negative)
instead of fixed values such as points and pixels. The top of the drop cap should be aligned with the body
text. To create drop caps, Amazon recommends using the following sample CSS:
Example
p.para {
font-size: 1em;
margin-bottom: 0;
margin-top: 0;
text-align: justify;
text-indent: 0;
}
@media amzn-kf8
{
span.dropcaps
{
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Publishing on Kindle: Guidelines for Publishers
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font-weight:normal;
font-size:320%;
float:left;
margin-top:-0.3225em;
margin-bottom:-0.3245em;
}
}
@media amzn-mobi
{
span.dropcaps
{
font-size:3em;
font-weight: bold;
}
}
<p class="para"><span class="dropcaps">T</span>his is a sample
To verify that the drop caps display as intended, test the book as described in section 8.1.1, Testing
Kindle Books.
The following is an example of a drop cap formatted using this method in a book with Enhanced
Typesetting enabled (to learn more about Enhanced Typesetting, see section 15):
Small font setting
Large font setting
9.3.7 Use CSS for Page Breaks
Do not insert blank lines of text to create page breaks. Use the CSS page-break-before and page-
break-after attributes. Alternatively, place each section of content that should appear after a page
break in a new HTML document.
9.3.8 Using Embedded Fonts
Kindle Format 8 supports embedded fonts within the eBook. These fonts can be either Open Type (OTF)
or True Type (TTF). Kindle does not recommend the use of Type 1 (Postscript) fonts. To provide Kindle
customers with the best possible reading experience, reflowable books that use Type 1 fonts are
rendered using Kindle fonts by default. On KF8-enabled devices and apps, customers have the option to
turn publisher-provided fonts on or off.
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